Perhaps the most significant development on the Internet in recent years has been the rapid proliferation of online social networks, such as LinkedIn™ and Facebook™. Billions of users are presently accessing such social networks to connect with friends and acquaintances and to share personal and professional information. In order to be successful, such online social networks need to provide reliable performance. This can be challenging because the underlying infrastructure that supports such online social networks typically comprises a large number of interconnected front-end and back-end systems. A performance problem in any one of these underlying systems can potentially affect the performance of the online social network.
Hence, to provide reliable performance in online social networks, system administrators need to carefully monitor performance data to quickly identify and alleviate performance problems before they escalate.